


you're the piano man.

by katarama



Series: Tumblr Ficlets [19]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alcohol, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Human, Dorms, First Meetings, M/M, Sharing a Bed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-24
Updated: 2015-11-24
Packaged: 2018-05-03 04:37:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5276915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katarama/pseuds/katarama
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>But on Friday nights, when Boyd’s with Erica and Derek’s with Braeden, Scott gets the room to himself.  It’s nice, in one sense - he gets to walk around in only his briefs without making Derek’s ears go pink, and no one cares if he sprawls his books out all over the floor.  Friday nights are the nights when he pulls out the lube and his toys, because he has roommates that are actually decent human beings and give him warning before they come back to the room.</p><p>The downside is, everything is quiet.  </p><p>Until about 3 AM, that is.</p><p>That’s when the piano starts up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you're the piano man.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rjosettes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rjosettes/gifts).



It’s 3 AM.

It’s 3 AM, and Scott regrets all of his life choices.

When he picked his room for the year, he chose entirely based on room size and location.  His room is objectively perfect, by those standards; sure, he’s in a triple, with Derek and Boyd, but for a triple, it’s absolutely huge.  They each get their own closets.  There’s enough floor space that they don’t have to bunk or loft their beds, and if they wanted to bunk, the ceilings are so high that even Boyd wouldn’t be bumping his head whenever he sat up.

There’s air conditioning, and the heater actually works.  There’s a dining hall in the building.  They’re right across the hall from the only dog allowed to be in the building and right next door to the single bathroom with a door that locks.  It is an amazing room, and they’re lucky to have gotten it in the suite lottery.

There’s only one problem.

The walls are thin, and on the other side of the wall is the dorm’s common room.

Most of the time Scott doesn’t care at all.  There are people in the common room, sure, and sometimes they make noise.  But it isn’t ever really enough to distract him from studying.  Most of the time, he doesn’t even notice at all, because when he needs to get some serious studying done, he jams his headphones in his ears and works, and when he isn’t studying, he’s hanging out and screwing around with his roommates.

But on Friday nights, when Boyd’s with Erica and Derek’s with Braeden, Scott gets the room to himself.  It’s nice, in one sense - he gets to walk around in only his briefs without making Derek’s ears go pink, and no one cares if he sprawls his books out all over the floor.  Friday nights are the nights when he pulls out the lube and his toys, because he has roommates that are actually decent human beings and give him warning before they come back to the room.

The downside is, everything is quiet.  

Until about 3 AM, that is.

That’s when the piano starts up.

Scott’s asleep the first time noise starts up from the instrument in the common room.  He’s a light sleeper when he’s alone, and he jerks awake to the loud thunk of the piano’s lid being dropped.  He blinks blearily at the loud screeching noise of the bench being dragged back away from the piano, his brain waking up and still not entirely sure what the noise is or where it’s coming from.

Things get cleared up pretty quickly when the music starts.  It’s uncoordinated plinking at best, a jarring jumble of dissonant notes.  It’s also a blatant violation of the rule spelled out clearly on the sign taped to the piano, the “no playing the piano past 10 PM” sign that is written in dark black, underlined, bolded letters.

Scott rolls over onto his front and buries his face in the pillow, pulling the ends up around his ears and hoping the music will stop.  It doesn’t.  It only gets louder, loud enough that Scott can sort of maybe pick out individual notes.

He considers actually doing something about it, but that seems like too much of a confrontation for three in the morning, and Scott doesn’t know if he can work himself up to that.  He waits a whole half an hour, and when he finally decides that there’s no end in sight to the endless stream of the same few notes over and over again, he gives up.  He gets out of bed, grabs his earplugs from his desk drawer, and jams them in, hoping that will be the end of it.

Naturally, it isn’t, of course.  Naturally, the next week, right when Scott starts settling into bed at 2:30 AM, the plinking starts up again.

Scott weighs his options carefully.  He’s wearing only his briefs, but he could easily slide a shirt and loose shorts on and call it appropriate dress to go into the common room and politely ask the person to stop.  His eyes aren’t even adjusted to the dark yet.  He could put on his fuzzy socks and go.

But Scott is so tired.  It’s been a very long week, papers and midterms and very long hours in lab.  Scott feels like he’s melting into the bed.  The thin, crinkled mattress pad feels way softer than he remembers it being, and his pillow feels like a ball of clouds beneath his head.  He has become one with the bed, and leaving it seems like a lot of work.

When he realizes he’s been listening to the pianist play long enough to recognize that the tune is the exact same as it was last time, he decides that’s the last straw, and he pulls himself out of bed to get dressed and go to the common room.  He shuffles sleepily to the door and lets the motion sensor lights turn on as he stumbles his way around the corner.  When he walks into the common room, he smells alcohol, and when he gets a good look at the person sprawled on the piano bench, it’s not actually that surprising.

His brown eyes are glassy, though he’s clearly trying to stare very intently at the keys of the piano.  His hair is brown and disheveled and standing up, like he spent half the night sweating and the other half running his hands through his sweaty hair.  His hands are big, his fingers nice and long, but they’re uncoordinated, straddling the gaps between keys and pressing down both, or neither at all.  He clearly has a song in mind, but with the haphazard way he’s playing, his fingers slipping and sliding and finding their footing in fits and spurts, it’s no wonder Scott can’t tell what it actually is.

Scott clears his throat, hoping the noise will be enough to draw the boy’s attention.  He doesn’t notice, or doesn’t care, if he does.

“Uh.  Hey, excuse me,” Scott says quietly, to no response.  

He sighs and finally reaches out his hand to tap on the guy’s shoulder.  The guy jumps, nearly careening backwards off the piano bench, frantically windmilling his arms until Scott reaches out to steady him, the palm of Scott’s hand pressed firmly against the skin between his shoulderblades.  The smile that he shoots Scott is as blinding as a drunken smile gets, dulled by the haziness in his eyes but loose in its affection.

“Thanks dude,” he says.  “You come to hear me play?”

“Not… exactly,” Scott says.  He takes a second, inwardly preparing to deal with a boisterous and potentially offended drunk person, which is a terrible mistake.  

“You are now!  I’m Stiles, and I’ma be a musician.”

Scott’s careful planning goes out the window when Stiles (and god, Scott has to wonder, is that a chosen name meant to sound like a stage name?  does he actually think he can do this with his life?) starts to play again, with even more gusto than before.  The louder Stiles plays, the more dissonant his melodies become, his left hand shifting everywhere to hit random notes, his right hand playing the same five or six keys over and over again.  It’s actually physically painful to Scott, and he wishes he had put his earplugs in before he walked out here, but Stiles is grinning away like he’s putting on the show of his life.

It gets both better and worse when he starts to sing.

“Neeeeeeeeearrrrr, faaaaaaaaaaaaar, whereeeeeever you aaaaaaaaare-”

“Oh my god,” Scott realizes, the tune starting to sound horrifically, vaguely familiar, for all its missteps.  “You play Celine Dion at 3 in the morning when you’re drunk.”

“I’ma romantic,” Stiles confirms, his fingers pressing down twelve keys at once as he turns his full attention to Scott.  He tries to bat his eyelashes at Scott, his movements slowed by the alcohol, making him appear to have more dust in his eyes than ardor.  

Scott sighs and goes to move his hand from Stiles’ back, finally.  Stiles wobbles, though, and Scott rethinks that decision.  “Dude, where do you live?”

“Up?” Stiles suggests helpfully.  “In a bed.”

“Great,” Scott says.  “Any idea what bed?”

Stiles thinks about it for a long moment, and Scott almost convinces himself that when Stiles opens his mouth again, he’s going to say something useful.  Scott is, of course, wrong.

“Yours,” Stiles says dreamily.

Scott almost leaves him then and there.  This cute boy with his freckles and his brown eyes and his mouth and his eyelashes should not be worth this much trouble.  But Scott does actually want to go to sleep before too long, and he knows that if he leaves Stiles, he will go right back to practicing to be the next Celine Dion.

“Okay,” Scott agrees.  “But you have to drink lots of water, first.  And no singing.  Just sleeping.”

“Won’t puke on your bed,” Stiles says, sounding pretty proud of himself, and Scott helps him up to his feet.  

“We’ll stop at the drinking fountain on our way,” Scott says, and Stiles clumsily loops his arm around Scott so the two of them can stumble their way down the hall together.

* * *

 

When Scott wakes up, he’s unusually hot, and his left half of his body is sore.  He cracks his eyes open to see the piano boy sprawled on his front, halfway on top of Scott, his long, bony limbs digging into Scott’s sides.  His eyes are wide open.

“Oh, dude, finally,” Stiles says.  “Do you have listerine?  My mouth tastes like shit.  Or, like, a toothbrush, I don’t mind sharing.”

“Mouthwash is on the bookshelf,” Scott says, and he winces as Stiles clambers over him, Stiles’ knee digging into Scott’s shin through the covers.  Stiles locates the bookshelf and the light purple mouthwash, taking a swig, with no apparent recognition of the fact that there isn’t a sink in the room.

He swallows it, his entire face scrunching up and his tongue sticking out of his mouth.  Scott is a bit afraid for his esophagus.  

“You feeling okay?” Scott asks.  “Last night you were singing Celine Dion.  Very badly.  I kinda wish I had recorded it for blackmail material.”

Stiles’ face contorts itself back into a grin quickly.  “I know.  I remember.  I was playing for you.”

“You were playing before we met,” Scott points out, but Stiles waves his hand, dismissing the point.  

“I was playing for the hypothetical you.  But then there was a you, so I was right anyway.”

Scott sighs, pulling himself up to a sitting position.  Letting Stiles sleep in his bed feels like a mistake; more of his body is sore than not from the two of them cramming into such a small bed.  “Not that I didn’t mind the serenading, but can we maybe not play piano in the common room at 3 AM?”

For the first time since Scott has met him, Stiles looks like it’s finally sinking in that he’s done something less than amusing, and, to Scott’s relief, he looks suitably abashed.  “I’m much better at the piano when I’m sober, anyway,” he says.  “I could play for you sometime?  As an apology.  And we could, uh.  Do something?  That would keep me busy and not drunk piano playing at 3 AM.”

Scott looks at him, standing in his boxers and the plaid shirt that he refused to take off the night before.  Scott probably should be aggravated with this guy, because he deprived Scott of precious beauty sleep and made Scott listen to the single most terrible rendition of My Heart Will Go On, which is a true feat in and of itself.  

But Stiles is definitely attractive, and Scott has a feeling that the date would be nothing if not interesting.  And if nothing else, because Stiles is asking, that means Stiles is offering apology dinner, which is free food.  And Scott is, inexplicably, a little bit fond of Stiles.

“If you give me your number, I’ll text you,” Scott promises.  “We can do something Friday night.  No more piano, though.”

Stiles grins and raises his hands into the air above his head, only looking a little bit disoriented.  “Fuck yeah.  Just wait and see, it’s gonna be hella awesome.”

Scott grins.  “You’d better be prepared to impress me, though, Stiles.”

“Oh, trust me,” Stiles says.  “I will.”

**Author's Note:**

> On tumblr [here](sleepy-skittles.tumblr.com).


End file.
